


And Every Sacrifice with Salt

by Zabbers



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 03:25:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2606723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How two men can save one another, now that they are no one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Every Sacrifice with Salt

They're eating fries, and this is nowhere, this is an anonymous diner in the middle of a city known for anonymity, and they've been discharged, given the illusion, whatever the reality, that they can melt into the civilian population like all the veterans who have come before. 

They're eating fries, and this is nowhere, and they are no one, and so when salt crystals like flakes of ash cling to Sheppard's lips, Rodney decides for once it's okay, he can look, he can stare. Sheppard has his aviator glasses on even though the place is dimly lit by unnatural fluorescents, such harsh, primitive light. Through the subtle flicker and the black lenses, Rodney can't see Sheppard's eyes, but knows he's not looking at anything. And maybe that guy with the really obvious military earpiece and the equally obvious CCW _is_ looking, but Rodney doesn't care. He wants to make Sheppard see him, and at the same time, he doesn't want to break this calm, and Rodney's never been so unsure of anything in his life.

But there's salt on the curve of Sheppard's lips, and they're eating fries, and Rodney knows Sheppard doesn't see him, and the diner, and the city, because he's replaying the same thing in his mind that Rodney can't stop remembering, in the dark between the foreign sheets of fifty dollar motel rooms, when the shadows thrown from the city lights through the windows seem to shift and slide until they take on patterns that were left far behind, in another city, another life, not unknown at all. And Rodney wants to make it better, he wants to ease those memories away and free them both of the shadows. So they can stop running, maybe.

He remembers what it was like, his lips against Sheppard's. He remembers the taste of salt and the tang of iron, how much they felt like girls' lips even as they began to blue, how it was to blow breath through them, locked desperately tight, how Sheppard's hips twisted under him when his heart finally started again and he tried to sit upright, still broken and strange under the alien light and shadow. How Rodney had to keep repeating until he was hoarse that yes, yes, it had worked, it had worked, the plan, John, it had worked.

All for nothing. But, Rodney wants to say, every night as they lie awake in their parallel beds, like tense bodies perfectly aligned in graves, that it wasn't for nothing, it wasn't for nothing at all, because look--they're here, in a diner, eating fries, salt on their lips, like grains of Antarctic snow, and they don't have to care about the agent watching them or the world watching them. They just have to see each other. Like they always saw each other, looking when no one was looking. 

There's salt, and the memory of blood, and lips like girls' lips with their own breath now, steady catalog of rhythms that Rodney long since learned to read; sometimes, at night, catching. Sometimes, like now, reluctant. Rodney wants to make it better, in the only way left to them, so, with no one watching, and everyone watching, he leans in and kisses the salt from the wound, a man saving another man in an anonymous diner, nowhere.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to Livejournal, 25 March 2008. Written for the mcsmooch challenge for wintercreek.


End file.
